Divine Reconstruction
by Ovo
Summary: SO:TtEoT aka, 3.  Nel has a crisis of faith when 'the end' is comprised of steel walls and familiar faces.  Set shortly after the beginning of Disk II, if you must know.


**_Divine Reconstruction_**

The leather-plate armor had partially disintegrated. That which remained fused together with the soft undershirt and flesh underneath, forming an ugly mess of a wound. Nevertheless, Nel had been lucky; a direct hit would have disintegrated more than just her armor. Even so, the injury wasn't something to be taken lightly. The damage was extensive to the naked eye, and there was no telling how much farther it went, internally. She held on strong with her left arm, but every time she tried to move her right, he could hear her grind her teeth.

Still, he could feel her strength ebbing. It was taking all she had to keep her arms so snugly about his neck as he carried her, with far less effort on his part, amidst deck; yet by the time he got her to Medical she wasn't letting go for anything.

"I'm not goin' anywhere," Cliff promised as he pried her hands off him. It was a fairly useless attempt; his translator was long since pocketed for easy carrying, and he was by far the least language savvy man in the galaxy, because, hey – who needed textbooks when you had technology?

Regardless of what he knew or didn't, she was babbling, now; mostly asking questions, he imagined... _angry_ questions by the sound of it. But then, she'd been completely out of it since well before transport, and probably had no idea what was going on. Just the sight of him calmed her down enough for him to arrange her on a cot, but he worried about going too far. Instead, he kneeled beside the sterile bed, never letting go of her hand.

The first impact of stellar living hit her, and he quietly watched her marvel over her strange new surroundings. Nel snapped at the doctor, little more than a savage mewl, as the latter poked and prodded her wound. She cringed away from the scanner, but, as it did no harm, found him again, no further than where he'd been the whole time.

She asked a question, no louder than a whisper.

Digging the translator out of his pocket, he raised the thing to his ear.

"How... did we fare?" Her voice was louder this time, but harsher... broken and uneven from the effort she put into exerting control.

Cliff smiled thinly, touching on a mere shadow of his cockier grins. "Pretty good, all things considered."

"She's a native?" the doctor asked abruptly, casting him a worried glance. Petty talk could wait.

"That a problem?"

"Heart's on the right side, and dorsal... I wasn't expecting-" The doctor fine-tuned her instruments, glaring at him for all it was worth, for which it was worth very little. She was worried, and worried him in turn. "Yes, it's a problem. I'll treat her as a Terran for now; any more surprises will have to be dealt with as they come."

"What does that-?"

The doctor ignored him, bringing forth a hypo-injector. They stung a bit, he knew, and Nel jumped, surprised.

"Hey- Hey, _relax_," Cliff insisted, holding her down while she struggled against him, struggled to _get away_, rasping what he could only imagine were epithets. She calmed down after a moment, though persisted in a stilted prayer. "...relax."

_Apris._ He shook his head, understanding no more than that, as her speech slurred. Crestfallen, she stared at him, bleary-eyed; he raised the translator again, in time as she recited the last line, clear and unhindered... a mantra unto itself. "-and I am not afraid."

The drug took its course. Her eyes closed, and her breathing slowed to nothing. Her pulse fluttered in his hand; _once, twice, once, twice, once..._

Her heart stopped.

Letting the translator where it fell, Cliff held her hand in his. He felt the seconds march by, _four, twelve, nineteen, forty-three, seventy-nine..._ as the doctor rushed to repair the damage. First went the damaged flesh, then the repairs to the cardiac tissue. Cellular regeneration came near last, repairing connective tissue that had been as carefully removed.

_Forty minutes_. Finally came the second shot and an electric stimulant. _This_, experience dictated, _was the dangerous part_.

_One, _the body convulsed; _two,_ nothing happened. _Three_, he felt it, weak in her fingertips. _Four..._

Nel took one shaky breath.

The worst was over. The rest, the doctor assured, was up to her.

o-O-o

This was not what was supposed to happen.

This was not the way it was supposed to be.

Nel Zelpher was dead; by all rights, she should have been with her father, her family within the Eternal Grove. Instead, she had died, was aware of her death like unto a cold _nothing_, clinging to her like the swift oblivion under the frozen rivers.

And yet, the fire that burned, _at long last_, was not the one she had expected. The almost familiar sensation of being drudged up out of the ice, searing pain becoming invisible, living warmth.

She was revived, but at cost.

The world to which she awakened proved a hazy shade of gray, as though some pompous lord had insisted on forging a bastion purely of moon silver. Standing out in stark contrast against the monotone, were a man she thought she knew, a woman bearing him uncanny resemblance, and strangely colored flowers in a vase that were, somehow, all wrong. In her hand, crushed in the man's uncanny grip, she could feel a steady pulse.

Proof, of a kind, this was not her promised afterlife.

"The river..." was years ago. The man jerked his head up, and a speck of drool landed on her hand. Nel didn't notice.

"What... did I do wrong?" She had lived through the ice, only to die to a man from another world. Another _sun_... Perhaps even another Apris, far away, had staked a claim on her. But He would never let that happen, would He...? "Have I been forsaken?"

"Huh?" Cliff rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand, and studied her curiously.

"You did this," she accused him, though not unkindly. She looked to Mirage, who stood on the other side of the bed. "I was dead..."

"Yeah, but... I mean, about that," Cliff tried to explain, but faltered and looked to Mirage. "It's... hard to explain."

"No. It's not." How many, after all, would she herself have recovered from death, had she that power? How many would she have damned in the process? "But it would have been kinder, had you left me to die."

"What?" he shook his head, "You don't understand-"

"And you do? There was nothing for me but an _abyss_. I..." Her scathing words fell short as the memory of sheer emptiness froze her spirit. Never had she felt so... _Lost_.

"It's not..." Cliff lowered the translator; he and Mirage exchanged worried words she didn't understand, and was only beginning to care to. "It's different here, you..."

"Okay, maybe it was, y'know, some kind of divine test," he suggested, suddenly switching sides. Mirage questioned him in tone, but he waved her off impatiently. "Or probably it just wasn't your time, am I right?"

"You lie to me." Nel stared at him for a long moment before a thin smile graced her lips. "I never thought you a believer."

"Never met a god I couldn't put down all by my own," Cliff admitted, shrugging callously. "Besides, it's easier to take your own meaning from life than it is to go looking for one that ain't there to begin with."

Perhaps he realized where he had crossed the line, for he abruptly clenched his teeth and ducked his head. It was a futile gesture; she placed no blame upon him... merely hurt deep inside. And it was for that reason that she sorrowed, and none other.

"Perhaps one day we will agree," Nel assured him, "but it is not today."

He might have contested that, was it in his power, but he visibly struggled for an argument before giving in, silently confirming her words in a single, pointed slouch. Lashing another to one's own way of thinking never did work, after all.

A sudden _hiss_ broke the silence, startling her. All eyes fell upon Maria, who had appeared from a fresh gap in the wall... The door slid shut behind her, though not before giving Nel the first sense of the outside of her suddenly claustrophobic room.

The enigmatic woman took note of her, but when she spoke it was not addressed to her. As soon as she finished, Mirage ran her fingers through Nel's hair and spoke a gentle word before leaving the three of them alone. More words, more unabashed staring, but Maria left shortly thereafter, after nod to Cliff, who stood at arms length, torn on whether to stay or leave. After a moment's hesitation, he crouched again beside the bed and raised the translator.

"Look, I..." It was the start of an apology, which he bit off because, as she assumed, he was not sorry.

Again, she held no blame over him.

"Are you gonna be all right?"

"I'll live," Nel replied. She smiled again, this time feeling something of the warmth she once knew creeping its way into the expression. "Though it seems I must thank you for that."

"Save it." He grinned; triumphantly, perhaps, but she let him have it all the same. "No one in his right mind would let someone like you die, not without a fight."

With a gentle squeeze, he finally let go of her hand and took his leave. Now alone, in an alien world, all she had left were her thoughts.

Cliff did have a point, whether he dared to understand it for himself or not.

Vigor flooded her limbs as she sat up, and though her back was sore, her arm responded with a minimum of stiffness. Her legs worked fine enough, and by their leave she took softly trained steps towards the only way out, barefoot, half-decent...

_Reborn_.

_Apris, lend me strength to accept what is not for me to understand..._ And perhaps... _perhaps_, she thought, there was more to it than any of them realized. Out there, waiting to be found amidst the ocean of suns._ Irisa, guide my heart as I follow blindly the path set before me..._

**_the end_**

* * *

**Working Title**: _Thiesm_

**Inspiration**: A startling lack of jumping on what could have been very interesting character development on canon's part. I don't know if I did it _well_, but I put more effort into it than Enix appears to have done.

**Noteworthy**: First Star Ocean fic; this despite that Star Ocean: The Second Story fic I've been trying to work out for like, _years_. The second half of this was originally from Cliff's PoV, but it totally wasn't working so far as to suck, so I stripped it and wrote it from Nel's instead (which was, incidentally, written backwards). The 40:4 "joke" amuses me, though it shouldn't.

**Disambiguation**: Set after Biwig shoots your best buddy. I modified the visual of translators, intentionally. More for effect, but a little for how they were presented. Why have that bulky as hell thing if all you had to do was _carry it_ in _your pocket_? I don't know enough about Elicoor culture, or physiology, or whether Nel ever fell under an iced-over river or had her heart stopped with her brain still technically awake and all that. So some of the backstory I pulled out of my hat. But if I had remembered the gods by name, that little end prayer would have been longer.

Derivative work of material © Enix, Square-Enix.


End file.
